• U.S. Officials Hope Confidence Campaign Pays Off for Midterm Elections

    “Americans should go to the ballot box with confidence,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Election Security Agency (CISA), told a cybersecurity forum late last month. Yet U.S. officials also acknowledge the threats to Tuesday’s elections are serious and are being treated with proper caution.

  • Beyond the Results, the Midterms Can Tell Us a Lot About How American Democracy Is Faring

    Election night and the days immediately before and after will provide valuable insights into the health of democracy in the United States. Here are four things to watch.

  • Ye (Kanye West): What You Need to Know

    Since early October 2022, Ye – the highly influential artist, record producer, and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West – has drawn media attention for inflammatory antisemitic and conspiratorial remarks. Here’s what you need to know about Ye’s statements, his history of espousing controversial views and why they are concerning.

  • Officials Fear Disinformation Could Spark U.S. Election Violence

    With just one week to go until the U.S. midterm elections, a key senior U.S. official is expressing concerns that misinformation, or influence operations by U.S. adversaries, could ignite violence at the polls. For weeks, top officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security have said they have found no traces of specific or credible threats to the November 8 vote.

  • The Business Case for Reducing Gun Violence

    While gun violence in the United States continues to claim lives at an alarming rate, it is also taking a quiet toll on the U.S. economy, according to new research. The research found that the toll of U.S. firearms injuries on the U.S. economy reaches billions of dollars annually.

  • Relaxing Conceal Carry Permit Restrictions Significantly Increases Firearm Assaults

    The average rate of assaults with firearms increased an average of 9.5 percent relative to forecasted trends in the first 10 years after 34 states relaxed restrictions on civilians carrying concealed firearms in public. Researchers say that specific provisions in conceal carry laws may reduce risks associated with civilian gun carrying.

  • Bolsonaro vs. Lula: What’s at Stake in Brazil’s 2022 Election

    Brazil’s presidential election is down to two polarizing candidates, and experts say the runoff will be a major test for one of the world’s largest democracies.

  • Better Regulating Drone Use Requires Communication, Not Surveillance

    In 2018, Congress gave the DHS and DOJ sweeping new authorities to destroy or commandeer privately-owned drones which pose a “credible threat” to a “covered facility or asset” in the U.S. as well as intercept the data it sends and receives. The definition of “credible threat” was left entirely to the discretion of DOJ and DHS.

  • U.S. Officials Reassure Americans: Upcoming Election Will Be Trustworthy

    Top U.S. officials are ramping up efforts to convince Americans that the upcoming midterm elections will be safe and that the results can be trusted – but officials note the election threat environment is “more complex than it has ever been.” The head of U.S. Cyber Command told an audience Tuesday that “we are seeing no significant indications of attacks that are being planned right now.”

  • Risk-Limiting Audits: Efficient Means of Confirming Accuracy of Election Results

    Risk-Limiting Audits refer to a process by which humans can ensure within a specified risk tolerance that the computerized tallies of paper ballots are correct by examining a random sample of paper ballots by hand.

  • Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality

    Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies when claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies fail to appreciate the fact that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts, while they are in custody, as illegal immigrants. These studies thus misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.

  • Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: The Scale of the Problem

    Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. immigration system is broken – but the issue is not who should be admitted legally, for how long, and what about their families. Rather, a defining way in which the system is broken is that the current system is unable to implement the policies that Congress and the administration have already chosen. This article summarizes the basic facts about the immigration backlogs, which comprise roughly 24 million cases across the U.S. government.

  • DHS Revokes Trump-Era Asylum Reforms That Were Tied Up in Court

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently canceled reforms made in 2020 to modernize the asylum system. DHS should have at least considered lawful alternatives before revoking.

  • Will DHS Again Leave H‑2B Winter Industries Short Workers?

    The H 2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal or temporary nonfarm jobs. USCIS recently announced that employers had already reached the H 2B cap of 33,000 visas for the winter months before the start of the season. The H 2B program is filling jobs in relatively niche areas or positions where the shortages are most severe. DHS should immediately raise the cap to allow more H 2B workers to enter these positions.

  • Making Each Vote Count

    MIT Ph.D. candidate Jacob Jaffe uses data science to identify and solve problems in election administration. A key takeaway from his ensemble of studies is that “while it’s relatively rare that elections are bad, we shouldn’t think that we’re good to go,” he says. “Instead, we need to be asking under what conditions do things get bad, and how can we make them better.”